My second last day at work in the AAO. I'll be flying back to KL this coming Saturday (24th Sept), and then off to London in the following Wednesday (28th) . The new term actually starts on Monday the 26th, so I'll be missing a few days of classes, boo-hoo.

I must say that I generally had fun here. Work was hectic because I was trying to cram 3 months' research into 2, and it was a bit lonely after Sam and Pablo finished their time here. But Sydney is a fantastic city, and I wouldn't hesitate to live here (whether I would work here however, is a different matter). It's in fact my favourite city after Paris, and it has the great virtue that it isn't filled with French people!

It's not going to be easy to go back to the dreary weather and disgusting food that awaits me in London, but c'est la vie. Not to mention the fact that I have a shitload of work and things to do once I get back. A dozen PhD applications need to be filled out, and Kinwah will be cracking his whip to make sure I don't slip up in his project.

My sister is coming into Sydney tomorrow (Friday), and I was going to take the day off to show her around, but then she just messaged me saying that we should only meet up in the evening because she wanted to spent the day shopping.

Girls.

I'm about perform the most significant act in my life since I decided to do physics: I am going to change my name. In scientific circles at least, from now on I will officially be known as Khee-Gan Lee, with a hyphen to make it loud and clear which part of my name is my given name.

I can understand it when people get my name confused...even native Chinese speakers or Malaysians can get confused, as 'Gan' is a common surname as well, so that do not know whether Lee or Gan is my surname. However, it's with Westerners that my name truly gets mangled. People calling me 'Khee' I can live with, people thinking 'Lee' is my given name I can also live with, but when my article comes out in a magazine (Astronomy & Geophysics) with 'Gan Lee' in bold at the top corner in the pages, that's the final straw!

So if I let my first published article(s) be K.G. Lee et al. 2005, I would put up with about 40 years of my name being mangled beyond comprehension, so it'll be K.-G. Lee et al. 2005 to avoid this. Hmm...maybe I should have discussed this with my parents, although I don't imagine it's that big an issue. It's just hyphen after all.

Speaking of K.-G. Lee et al 2005, the MSSL paper was originally slated to be my first, but my supervisor is busy with his PhD student's thesis and wouldn't be free till the end of the month, so it'll only be finished when I get back to London. Fortunately, I have a second K.-G. Lee paper coming up (K.-G. Lee & J. Bland-Hawthorn 2005 actually, as it's just me and my supervisor here at AAO), although this is in an Australian journal which is a bit less impact, but with a bit more work we could probably follow it up in an American journal after I leave, albeit with the author names reversed.

I have changed the signature on all my e-mail addresses from Descartes' famous "Cogito, ergo sum"("I think, therefore I am") quote to a new, less well-known, one:

"Audaces, fortuna juvat"

This is a phrase which means "Fortune favours the bold", by the Roman writer Virgil.

I chose this to reflect that much of what I have achieved so far in life has been down to a readiness to do what I feel is necessary despite what people think. Some of it might seem relatively trivial, like asking questions in class even if it makes other people think that I'm an arrogant twat, but in retrospect this is a habit which has made lecturers notice me when they wouldn't otherwise have. When applying for the STScI internship in Baltimore last year, I asked Dr. Mark Cropper, one of my first year lecturers, to write me a reference letter. I never knew what he said about me as he sent it directly to STScI, but someone else later told me that Dr. Cropper regards me as one of the best students he has ever encountered, and this is based solely on the questions I asked in his class. Prof. Miller, another lecturer I'm friendly with, specifically advised me to continue asking questions regardless of what other people think because it helps me develop my own perception of science.

Another little fact which I don't tell many people about: before I entered university, I was briefly working as a professional guitarist both teaching and performing. At that point, I was 19 years old, and it had only been four years since I started learning the guitar, yet I managed to con my way into a job at a music school (I got fired after a few months, not because I was crap, but that's another story...). Even more outrageously, I phoned up every single 4-star hotel in town to ask if they needed a lounge guitarist (I was humble enough to realise that I should get some experience before trying for a job at a 5-star hotel), and surprisingly enough, the Swiss Garden Hotel decided to give me a shot, paying me RM1,500 to play for 12 hours a week (RM1,500 is probably equivalent to US$1000 in spending power, based on the price of McDonalds'). Unfortunately, I had to leave for university after a month on that job, but it was a memorable experience, and I'm not sure too many teenagers have had the experience of playing classical guitar in hotel, dressed in a suit and bow-tie:


(Eek...my technique was SO bad back then...)

Up to now, I've had quite a few jobs up to now ('job' defined as something which has earned me money): musician, reporter, researcher, writer, and I think every single one of them was because of "Audaces fortuna juvat"

It's 11.10pm now and I'm sitting in the office, having just managed to debug my code and set it running...and I was supposed to rest this evening. Admittedly, I spent a couple of hours in the local shopping centre running some errands, and have had dinner (and watched an episode of The Simpsons) so it hasn't been nonstop work all day.

Still, I have less than 3 weeks left in Sydney, and I'm rushing to finish as much of my project (which, incidentally, I haven't gotten around to explaining yet) as possible before I have to go. Joss, my supervisor, is really friendly and cheerful at times, but through email his tone becomes rather brusque and harsh, which is somewhat confusing. He has also been putting subtle pressure on me by referring to my project as 'very important work', which thus far is a brilliant strategy because I'm so sensitive to criticism.

And my MSSL paper still hasn't been completed yet (I guess I should get round to explaining about it some day as well). It's like trying to kill a hydra...everytime I finish part of it, something else crops up that demands doing, or parts of it demands re-doing. I wrote the first draft in early June, and it has always looked like being a week from completion for the past couple of months. I hope dearly that I can finish it off by this weekend, but the jury is still out whether I will.

Am currently listening to Beethoven's 'Hammerklavier' Piano Sonata for about the 5th time today...music has been the thing that's been keeping me sane, but the pressure to prepare for my upcoming recital isn't too welcome.

But it'll be worthwhile in the end.

I just received the programme for my upcoming recital in November (the formatting got a bit screwed up in the conversion to PDF, but it should give the general gist of things). It's going to be a blast, so everyone who's anywhere near London is cordially invited, of course.

To make sure that it's actually a blast and not a bomb (heh), I've been practising like crazy. It's not to reassuring that 9 weeks before the recital I still have about 3 pages of the Bach left to memorise, let along bring to performance level. My part of the programme is about 15 non-stop minutes of virtuoso music without any easy stuff in between for my fingers to rest, so I really have to make sure that everything is completely secure, as any insecurity will lead to tension, which in turn will tire me out really quickly.

As for work here, I can't believe that I only have 3 more weeks left in Sydney, but at least it looks like my project is making some progress, although whether I can manage to actually squeeze a publishable paper out of this remains to be seen.

Pablo has already left, and Sam is leaving this Thursday, so after that I'll be the only sucker here till I go. It's gonna be a bit lonely and depressing, but on the bright (kind of) side I can manage my time more effectively as I won't have anyone to hang out with.

Why is that people who have the least to say usually are the most talkative?

Sam and I were supposed to go watch an Australian Rules Football match in downtown Sydney today afternoon. He was the one who suggested it, so I let him do the planning. We were supposed to meet at the lounge at noon before setting off, and when I got there he was already waiting.

He seemed slightly discomfitted when he saw me. He said, "Uhh...I have slightly bad news...I just found out that the match today is an away game." Apparently, he had not picked up on the fact that the location of the match at Melbourne Cricket Ground probably meant it was not in Sydney.

We went into town anyway and spent the entire day walking a huge circle around the city centre, walking to Macquarie Point where we had spectacular views of the Harbour Bridge and Opera House, moving on to Hyde Park passing through the dodgy Kings Cross area (best shop sign ever: "THE LOVE MACHINE"), before walking back through Oxford St. before ending up at the Town Hall where we started. My legs were just worn out by the evening.

A couple of days ago, as I was wiping my spectacles in my morning, the damn thing broke off right at the bridge connecting the two lens, leaving me holding the one half on each hand. I did not bring any spare glasses nor contact lenses, so the prospect of spending a couple of days being effectively blind was not very palatable.

However, I fell on my figurative feet, as the AAO has an engineering department, so I brought my spectacles to them, and one particular technician, Stan, kindly spent an hour welding my specs together with a blowtorch(!). My glasses now look as if it's been through a flame thrower (which it effectively has), but at least it's essentially back in business.

While he was fixing my frame, he mentioned that he once worked as a jeweller (!!). His surname is Miziarski and he speaks with a strong East-European accent, implying he's very likely Jewish. It's such a stereotype, the Jewish jeweller...

When I was up in Siding Spring, holed up in the telescope control room, I spent a lot of time around Kinwah, my supervisor. He was my secondary supervisor for my research project last year, so I had to meet him regularly (I had commented some time ago on his propensity to just sit there lecturing me for hours while I sat there nodding), but having to hang around with him for 15 hours a day was a totally different proposition.

He is a remarkably perceptive person (he has an unfinished PhD in educational psychology), and extremely blunt if he has something to say to me. On the coach journey to Coona, he suddenly commented, 'You seem as if you have something to prove most of the time...'.

Which is true.

I've spent most of the past few years being haunted by the spectre of failure, and pushing myself into an insane workrate. It's a complex motivation with many facets, driven in part by the memories of being a perennial underachiever in school, a thirst for glory and fame, and other psychological baggage. I've pushed myself this far, so it's just a means to a good end, isn't it? However...

'If you carry on like this for too long you'll get a nervous breakdown sooner or later', Kinwah said, 'and if you care so much about what people think about you, as you progress in your career you'll meet much smarter people...'. He says that if I put all my motivation into making people think I'm smart etc., I will crash the moment I meet true geniuses in my career.

The only way out is for me to put all my motivation into a love for science. So far, I've tried taking his advice, but it's not easy to make the transition. I'm the laziest git I know by far, and the laziness has been winning in the past few days. It's not that I don't love science, but sometimes when dealing with boring and tedious work, it difficult to call up the wonder and joy of discovery.

Thought of the day: I've been dealing a lot with the solar spectrum (more on that some other day), which involved working with some old data catalogues dating back to the 1940s and '50s. These are thick and heavy tomes encasing reams of arcane data, which are literally pages and pages of numbers. Back before the days before computers, it must have been an incredibly tedious and slow process to create the catalogues by hand. Yet there were people who devoted their entire careers to such unglamorous work.

What could have driven them?

I've just updated my other blog with the article which won me the first prize in the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS)'s Science Writing competition.

I have realised that my blog must have seemed rather schizophrenic lately, with my opinions and anecdotes on various issues mixed in with some personal rants. So, I'm creating a separate blog, where I put my thoughts on science and other 'professional' stuff. It's here.

Some of you also know I like to write science articles for the general public, and I hope to regularly post such pieces on the blog. Everytime I update that site, I will mention it in this blog, so regular readers have no need to bookmark both blogs.

It might have come to your notice that I had dropped out of notice for around a week last month. This was because I was out in the outback doing some observations on a telescope.

The AAO has 2 telescopes in Siding Spring out in the country, but as I'm doing a theoretical project, I wasn't really expecting to get to do any actual observations.
However, it turns out that my supervisor from UCL in London is coming down to Australia for an observing run on the Australian National University 2.3m telescope which is also based in Siding Spring, so I took off for 5 days from work to support this observation.

Siding Spring is right on the edge of the Warrumbungle National Park (I love Aussie names!) in NSW, and the nearest town is Coonabarabran, about 600km from Sydney. It was a 8 hour train/bus ride, first through the Blue Mountains, and then through cattle country. The only towns we passed by weren't so much sleepy as comatose.

Finally, we got to Coona:



From Coona, we get a taxi up to Siding Spring, which is a mountain about 1000m high. We see a sign warning us not to disturb the local wildlife...



The first thing we see when we approach Siding Spring is the dome of the 3.9m diameter Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) looping over us...



A closer view of the AAT dome...



Close-by, a couple of scientifically-minded wallabies have also come on observing runs:



I'm officially an employee of the AAO, so I get a desk inside the dome. However, the actual telescope is off-limits to everyone apart from technical staff and observers, so I couldn't go close-up to the telescope. I got this shot from the tourist gallery. The telescope is on an equatorial mount, which means that the mounting is actually inclined at the same angle as the latitude of its position, which facilitates star-tracking, as you only need to track along one axis of the telescope:



Just for reference, here is a picture of the AAT nicked off the net...


And a royal touch...



The telescope we'll be using is the ANU 2.3m reflector, which is in an 'alt-az' mounting, which is similar to a naval gun mounting. It's more difficult to track stars because u have to simultaneously adjust both axes at once. The entire building rotates with the telescope, and it's really cool as everything rattles and shakes as the telescope slews to acquire a new target...the big disadvantage is that they can't attack any plumbing to the dome, so the toilet is right at the base on the far side of this picture. The control room is about at the 2nd storey of the dome. To get from the control room to the main entrances means passing through the telescope...during observations, the light-spillage and thermal air drafts caused by this is unacceptable, so to take a piss, I have to walk out though the external door and walk down the metal stairs, all in pitch dark and freezing night wind...



There are about 8 telescopes at Siding Spring...from L-R: ANU 15-inch, ANU 2.3m, ANU 40-inch, AAO 1.2 Schmidt, 2m Faulkes, and the 3.9m AAT. A couple of other smaller telescopes are not visible here.




Siding Spring was chosen because there's hardly anyone within the horizon, and because it's high (by Aussie standards anyway). The mountains in the background of this view are about 100 miles away. At night, it's basically pitch-black all the way out to the horizon.



The surrounding areas are mostly national parks, and Siding Spring is the highest point nearby, so there were some spectacular views...





That's all for now...will be back on another day with more pics of the actual observations...

We had a coffee meeting this morning... I came in a bit late and the Director of the AAO was talking about some projects in progress in the Gemini Observatory. It went something like this, 'Well, the proposals for Gemini is that there is a competition between HERNIA and PERVS, so they'll need to split their efforts...'

What? HERNIA? PERVS? One thing which I noticed about astronomers is this: they like to contrive really silly acronyms for things. I found this website called DOOFAS (Dumb Or Overly Forced Astronomical Acronyms).

Here are some of my favourites:

2D-FRUTTI: 2-D Photon Counting System (I swear, I didn't make this up)
ANIS: All Neutrino Interaction Simulation (LOL!)
BAD: Balmer-Absorption-Dominated (Nuclei)
BICEP: Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization (feel the burn)
CANGAROO: Collaboration between Australian and Nippon for a Gamma Ray Observatory in the Outback (krazy!)
COLA: Compact Objects in Low power Agns
GOD: Gravity One Dimension (The paper was entitled `The likelihood of GODs' existence'...)
HIS/HERS: High Intensity Spectrograph / High Energy Range Spectrometer
HO-BAGS: Hubble Observatory BAckground Galaxy Survey
HOEs: Holographic Optical Elements
MACHO: MAssive Compact Halo Objects
MIRACLE: Mid-InfraRed Array Camera of Least Effort
OWL: Overwhelmingly Large Telescope (so big, it's ridiculous)
PIG: Partially Ionized Globule
PINOCCHIO: PINpointing Orbit-Crossing Collapsed HIerarchial Objects (Egad!)
POOPSY: Phase One Observing Proposal SYstem
SAURON: Spectroscopic Areal Unit for Research on Optical Nebulae (mmmm, nerdy)
SMIRFS: Sub Millimeter InfraRed Fiber-feed System (or something)
SPIFFI: SPectrometer for Infrared Faint Field Imaging
T-RECS: Thermal REgion Camera System
YORIC: Yet another Optimal Resolution Image Constructor (Alas...)

These are NOT made up....I recognise several acronyms I know of which are real. So, it would appear that astronomers have way too much time on their hands...must be while waiting for bad weather to clear during observations...

Today, the 6th of August, marks 60 years since the first combat use of an atomic bomb over Hiroshima. 3 days later, on the 9th, another nuclear weapon was dropped on Nagasaki (little known fact: the original target was the city of Kokura, but it was covered with clouds, preventing from the aircraft from aiming the bomb. So the bomber proceeded to Nagasaki instead). These strikes precipitated the Japanese surrender less than a week later.

As a physicist, I regard the beginning of the nuclear age as a loss of innocence for physics... the entire Manhattan project which created the atom bomb involved countless physicists, many of them already well-established (like Fermi, Oppenheimer, Bethe etc) and others who would eventually go on to become Nobel-prize winners in their respective fields, like Feynmann and Segre. So in a sense, my intellectual predecessors were responsible for opening this Pandora's box, and I am personally fascinated by the history of this effort, which had its beginnings with the discovery of radioactivity in the late 19th century, at the end of the steam age.

It was also this moment when physicists went from being detached boffins to becoming a strategic resource...the nation with the most physicists would hold the key to power (this is of course not as simplistic, but certainly it must have seemed so in the immediate aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Billions of dollars were poured into physics research, a lot of it directly into nuclear weapons development, but much of it had very tenuous links, like particle physics and space research. For scientists in the US and Soviet Union, making vague, indirect links to weapons programmes used to be a useful way to get research funding (a project with the word 'nuclear' or 'atomic' in it doesn't necessarily have much to do with nuclear weapons or energy at all).

I have been to Hiroshima some years back, and it was quite a harrowing experience; the Peace Park is such a serene and beautiful place, until you realise that before the bombing it was a densely populated slum. I dearly wish Nagasaki is the last time anyone ever uses the bomb, but... I think the decision to drop the bombs was the right thing to do.

Japan was being blockaded by mid-1945, most of its navy on the bottom and its army beaten back from across the Pacific, but there was still an absolute refusal to surrender unconditionally (the military elite were only hoping for a conditional 'surrender' which would mean, among other things, that no occupation troops were to touch mainland Japan and most of the existing power structures would remain intact).

It was intended that in the event of an Allied invasion of mainland Japan, every man, woman and child would fight to the death. This was no idle threat: in the battle of Iwo Jima, the Japanese residents (including elderly and children) there had flung themselves off a cliff rather than be captured by American troops. So if the invasion had occured, in addition to massive combat casualties on both the Allied and Japanese sides, huge numbers of Japanese civillians were likely to have perished as well. A million Japanese combat troops were still stationed in China/Manchuria, and they would have provided a huge fight for the Allies, as well as continuing the brutal oppression of the occupied Chinese.

So, I believe that in the cold arithmetic of war, the use of atomic weapons was a tragic, but necessary decision.

On Tuesday evening, I was working overtime at the office when suddenly I received a phone call from home. My mum had just called me on the weekend, so it was unusual for her to call again so soon. She asked me what I was doing, if I had dinner etc., which was what she always starts off with whenever she calls me. A few minutes into the conversation, she suddenly said, 'Your eldest aunt's husband just passed away yesterday.' (We were talking in Mandarin, and it's a bit less awkward sounding it seems in English). This came as a total shock to me; I knew he had been ill for the past few years and he had to have major liver surgery last year, but there was no indication that he was critically ill. He wasn't the first family member to have passed away in my recent memory, but yet I felt a sadness that I haven't felt previously, and tears started welling up.

When I was a baby, my parents left me under the care of my father's eldest sister as my mother wanted to keep working; I only went back home with my parents in the weekends. Thus, I spent the first two years of my life in that house with my aunt's family, until my sister was born and my mother decided to quit work. There is hardly anything I remember from that period of infancy, but my parents tell me that my aunt's husband was very fond of me when I was staying in his house, and I used to cry whenever my parents came at the weekend to bring me home.

Years later, when I was about 4-6 years old, when my family went to visit this aunt, or when we were all at my grandmother's house, I would insist on staying overnight at my aunt's house... I still have memories from this part of my life, squeezing into bed with my cousins (they were 6-7 years older than me, and as I was my parents' eldest child, I regarded them as older brothers), and digging for toys in the musty dust-filled storeroom. I remember clambering up the shelves in the living room,looking for things I could play with.

After I was past 8 years old or so, my bond to my aunt's family waned... memories from my infancy and early childhood faded as I grew up, and I've hardly spoken to my cousins or their father since then. Still, I continued feeling a strong, unspoken, affinity to my aunt and her family. Whenever my family went to visit their house, I would somehow feel very much at home as every corner carried echoes of my early years. The cabinets which I had climbed up as a child now seemed so very small, yet so comfortingly familiar.

In the past decade, I must have not spoken directly to my aunt's husband except for greeting him (in part because I'm not very fluent in my supposedly native Hokkien language, and because the generation gap is so huge), yet went my mother told me he had passed away, I started crying (I have tears in my eyes as I write this). Maybe it's because he was present in some of the happiest memories of my life, and with his passing I seemed to have lost another link to my childhood.

I have not said anything about what sort of person he was, but on a level it doesn't matter. All my personal reminiscences of him have now regressed beneath the level of my conscious memory, and the emotion I felt at his passing is coming from a little boy who still lurks somewhere within my subconscious. Yet, I have one very vivid memory of him: I must have been 6 or 7, and my family was visiting his house. At that age, he seemed so towering, and he picked him up and swung me around as I squealed and laughed. In that brief moment, I was flying.

I have no other memories of anyone ever doing that to me.

So far, work has been good. I met Joss, my supervisor on Tuesday. He had just returned from a couple of months in Europe on Sunday, and he was too jet lagged to come into work on Monday. Joss is actually an Englishman, and he had presumably brought his family back to UK/Europe for vacation.

Joss is a very nice person, and in fact one of the most charismatic people I've met. He is effervescencely enthusiastic about the project we'll be doing (more on this later...). He might have noticed that I seemed rather glum most of the time.... but whenever I'm with someone who is very animated, I tend to be quite 'down', as if their friendliness is pushing me down. Or is it a natural suspicion towards people who are friendly towards me for no reason? He was also praising me a lot even on my first day at work, which made me feel a bit more unconfortable.... I tend to get uncomfortable when I get praised which I do not feel is warranted. I once had a friend who said that she liked praising people because it made her feel good...maybe he's like that as well. Personally, I feel that praise is devalued if it's given out too liberally.

Still, work is nice. The AAO shares is in the same compound as the Australian Telescope National Facility (which deals with radio telescopes...while the AAO operates optical/IR telescopes, and most of the buildings here actually belong to the ATNF. The ATNF also runs a lodge where visitors can stay, and this is where I'm staying. The other two summer students in this programme, Sam from Yorkshire and Pablo from Valencia (Spain), are also staying in my place. The rooms are en-suite, and the lodge is very well equipped, with a nice kitchen, free laundry facilities and TV lounge, and I'm basically paying hostel prices for this, so I have plenty of money to spend on other things.

I just went to downtown Sydney last weekend, and my pics of the harsh Sydney winter are here...

Apologies for not posting anything for over a month. This was due to a combination of heavy workload and a lack of Internet access outside my workplace.

In any case, a quick update on what I've been up to... I was at MSSL for 5 weeks in most of June and early July, creating a new model describing relativistically shifted AGN reflection spectra. The model creation was reasonably straightforward, but the testing and verification has been an absolute bitch due to my inexperience in experimental x-ray astronomy, which wasn't helped by the fact that both my supervisors were away during my last week in MSSL.

Of course, on 7/7 the London bombings occured. I was at MSSL in Surrey (1 hour outside London) when it happened, so I wasn't directly affected by the chaos which ensued, but nevertheless it was emotionally catastrophic. It's not nice to have carnage happening in places which I'm familiar with (the Edgware Rd, Kings Cross and Tavistock Sq blasts were within walking distance of UCL, and I often take the No. 30 bus that got blown up with 13 fatalities). I'm familiar enough with the locations of the incidents to note the irony that the Tavistock Sq blast occured virtually in front of a statue of Mohandas Gandhi situated right in the middle of the square.

In the weekend after the attacks, I went to visit 'La Loco' Mel in Cambridge. The train to Camb from London departs from Kings Cross station (the National Rail trains were mostly unaffected, just the Tube), and there were missing-person notices plastering the walls in and around the station. A street corner outside the station was set aside for floral tributes from the public to the victims, with an army of journalists and TV camera crews nearby. I was standing outside watching the scene when I saw an old man giving his respects to the dead. It happened that the weekend was the commemoration day for the end of the Second World War, and this old gentleman had a chestful of medals, obviously a veteran of the carnage 60 years ago. It was deeply moving to see him quietly bowing his head to the victims, when he had already gone through the worst carnage in human history nearly an entire lifetime ago.

Anyway Cambridge was blast... Mel brought me for lunch at a tapas restaurant so she could laugh at my feeble attempts at speaking Espanol, we listened to a symphonic concert by the Camb Graduate Orchestra in the magnificent Trinity College Chapel, and took punt along the River Cam. Mel is doing her PhD in the Institute of Astronomy in Camb, so she brought me there to take a look... I was such a workaholic that I actually managed to get a fair amount of work done by remote connection to MSSL via one of the IoA workstations. It's a nice spacious place with plenty of large windows and greenery just outside. Mel also pointed me out to Andy Fabian a.k.a. King Carlos IV of Spain. Andy Fabian is famous because he's one of the most prolific authors in astronomy, and we nicknamed him King Carlos IV because he bears an uncanny resemblance to several portraits of the monarch we saw in the Museo del Prado in Madrid.

















Separated at birth? King Carlos IV of Spain (left image, at left) and Andy Fabian (R)

A few days after returning from Cambridge I flew back to KL. I stayed in KL for only 4 days (although I managed to have a big argument with my parents within that time) before flying down to Melbourne in Oz, along with my sister. She's starting a degree in Creative Arts in the University of Melbourne, so as I was going down to Australia anyway, my parents decided to let me accompany her. Officially Melbourne was supposed to be a holiday for me, but I spent half the time helping my sister settle and sort out her things, while another part was spent trying to finish my MSSL project (unsuccessfully) via my hotel room's wireless connection. I didn't get to do much sight-seeing in Melbourne (my camera ran out of batteries, so no pics from Melbourne unfortunately), although I did manage to meet up with a couple of old friends (except *cough cough* Gin).

I flew over to Sydney last Sunday ... the Anglo-Australian Observatory (AAO) where I'm working is in Epping, a suburb about 30 mins train ride from downtown Sydney, and surprisingly I managed to get to AAO without any hassle. AAO is in the premises of the Australian National Telescope Facility (ATNF), and I'm staying in a lodge within the ANTF grounds just a few minutes walk from work. My supervisor, Joss Bland-Hawthorn, just flew back from overseas in the weekend, and he didn't come in yesterday (Monday), so I spent the day goofing around reading science magazines and trying to finish my MSSL project (again, didn't get very far). Joss has just come in today, but he's entertaining a guest so I'm still goofing off at the moment.

I'll write more about AAO and Sydney later, but for now I'd better wrap up this post.

I'm currently working in MSSL, nestled on the side of a hill in the Surrey countryside. I'm supposed to be here for 5 weeks (although I'm being funded to work for 8 weeks, heh), and I just got here on Monday. MSSL is in an old Victorian mansion which some rich old person donated to UCL, which did the most obvious thing: turn it into a space science lab. Anyway it's a very nice location, if slightly out of the way. The view is a stunning vista across the fields of Surrey and almost all the way to the coast. And the old Victorian architecture here gives an ambience of poshness which scientists aren't very used to in general.

I'm staying with one of my supervisor's post-docs, Curtis. Before I came here, he warned that his flat is crammed with things his family sent him which he didn't need, and that he has the habit of working strange hours. When I first arrived at his flat, I saw that he wasn't exaggerating about his flat being cramped. Before saying anything else, I should mention that Curtis is the epitome of a Star Wars fan. I consider myself a fan, but I do not own 98% of all Star Wars publications nor a third of the toys (Curtis' own estimate). His storeroom, where I was to put up, was filled to the ceiling with boxes of Star Wars toys. We moved about half of the stuff to his living room, just enough for me to put my inflatable mattress. As a result, his living room, which already had stuff scattered all over the place is now packed to the brim with all manner of boxes and miscellaneous objects.

When I opened the window in my room (i.e. the storeroom) to ventilate it, he said, 'Oh good, that'll let in some insects for my carnivorous plants'. Cue awkward pause from me. He does in fact have carnivorous plants hanging near the windows around his flat, although they don't look as menacing as I'd imagine. He also has a couple of tropical plants in his bathroom, with several sun-lamps permanently shining on them. This has the unintended effect of turning his bathroom into a sauna.

He then mentioned to me, 'I hope you brought some plates of your own, because I have only one plate'. I did in fact bring along with me my tupperware and cutlery, but that was more with the intention of using it to cook instant noodles than for holding its own as my only utensils. He also didn't have any dish-washing liquid ('Ive never bothered, because I never entertain visitors'), so I had to buy some to clean up after I eat.

In spite of this situation, things are actually quite fine. Curtis is a bit eccentric to say the least, but he's pretty nice, and the fact that he seems to like working late means that we don't get into each others' way so much. His flat is a bit too cramped for my tastes, but there's an endless supply of Star Wars comics and books to keep me entertained, and my inflatable mattress is actually surprisingly comfortable.

The only slight quibble left is the fact that I have to walk about 40 minutes as part of my daily commute to work, This is a bit of a drag, but at least I get plenty of exercise.

Life is good here.

I have finished 4 of my exams now....there is one more paper left which is 2 weeks away,but I guess I'll only need to study part-time for it, so to speak. The exams haven't been bad overall....apart from solid s*** physics, I think I did all that was humanly possible for the other papers. But I'd better not speak too soon...I have one more paper to go.

Anyway, on Tuesday I went to a CD launch by my pianist friend Mei Yi, who is a fellow Malaysian. It was held at a piano centre in a posh part of London near Picadilly. I was supposed to meet Jane and Bobby there so that we can discuss our concert in November along with Mei Yi, but I was the first of us to arrive, apart from Mei Yi who was already there, but she was busy greeting people for a while before she withdrew to prepare for her recital. Thus, I spent quite a while milling about aimlessly amongst the literally chattering classes, partaking in the free beverages and Pringles on offer. As this was a private event, a lot of the people there were clearly Mei Yi's friends, and from their conversation they seemed to be mostly musicians as well. Apart from musicians themselves, most of the people there were rich old people who see themselve as patrons of the arts. The musician in me appreciates this, but then the socialist in me is shouting 'Bourgeouisie!'.

Mei Yi gave a short recital, followed with a lot of congratulations from the audience and a CD signing session afterwards. I won't say much more about the recital itself, except to say that she has a solo recital at Wigmore Hall next Thursday which I am looking forward to listening.

I was however impressed with the fierce adoration that Mei Yi has among her fans. I spoke to this lady who turns up to virtually every single one of her performances in London... she told me that at an earlier concert in Wigmore Hall, Mei Yi played before two other musicians. After Mei Yi finished, the lady just left the hall because she went just to watch Mei Yi. One of the people who spoke after the short recital concluded with, '...and we look forward to seeing Mei Yi becoming one of the premier concert pianists!'.

I would be a bit more cynical than that... she's a fine pianist, but she's already 25 and there are so many other pianists out there that the competition is insanely ferocious. In the naivette of my youth, I had wanted to be a musician. My parents had given a firm 'no' to that, and I was extremely angry at the time, but now I know actual professional musicians and how they have to struggle, I have to admit that I see their wisdom.

As for Mei Yi, even if she doesn't hit the absolute prime-time, I think she has already secured for herself a great career as a concert pianist.

I had 2 exams this week: quantum mechanics on Thursday and cosmology the day after that. I shan't say more about the exams apart from the fact that I could do most of the stuff, although cosmology had a bit too many 'wordy' questions for my liking.

Immediately after the cosmology exam, as I was packing up my stuff, a guy from my class whom I didn't really know came up to me and said, 'Khee Gan, could I ask you something?'. I'm used to people coming up to me asking me questions about the courses, occasionally even from people I do not know, so I just said yes. 'Is it true that you left early in quantum yesterday?'. Usually, people leave early in exams if a)They can't do any of the questions and can't be bothered to sit there in boredom, or b) They are so good at the paper that they've finished everything well before the allocated time.

Now, I'm fairly well known in class as the guy who always asks questions in class, and my reputation for being the top student in class is quite widespread (even though technically I'm not the top student...my average lagged Xinhui's by < 1% last year). So he must have been implying that I was so smart that I can walk out of the toughest paper before time. I gave him a puzzled look and said no. He turned to his friends and said, 'See...he didn't leave early!'.

I've had earlier indications about crazy rumours circulating about my prowess. Last term, Courtney in my space systems tech class leaned over to me and asked, 'Khee Gan, out of sheer curiosity, is it true that you got an average of 97% last year?'. Now, I was pretty pleased about my 91%, but I personally think that 97% is just plain insane and out of reach. I never boast as I feel that arrogant people are just asking to be put down, but apparently in this case the fact that I don't talk about my results has just let all sorts of rumours about me spring up. Maybe there are rumours that I'm being nominated for the Nobel prize floating around as well.

Most people get gossip about relationships and stuff. I get gossip about my imaginary intellectual prowess.

I am pretty much a confirmed atheist, but sometimes it does feel as if my life is being pushed in a certain direction by circumstances beyond my control. People sometimes think I must be an absolute genius of some kind, but my answer would be: get stuck in a Catholic men-only hall, have no girlfriend despite years of trying, hardly any interest in pop culture, what's left to do?